ColorThink, our venerable color graphing and diagnosing tool, has been available in one form or another since August 2000 and has users in over 90 countries. We continue to develop updates for the current releases and have also been working on a significant upgrade for some time.

Our plan has been to have a 4.x upgrade before macOS Catalina (10.15) was released. Apple's new macOS has removed the ability to run 32-bit applications entirely; while you can run them in VM environments like Parallels or VMware, it's a pain, and something we like to avoid.

Unfortunately software development is something that rarely goes to plan, and the new ColorThink hotness is not ready in time for Catalina. We're very excited about it and have been adding features and technologies developed in our other tools as well as new capabilities not seen anywhere else.

We were faced with the decision between having our great users wait until the new software is ready (see above re: software development delays) or do some retrospective development by rolling up our sleeves and pushing to get the current version (or a feature-equivalent version) running happily in 64 bits and on Catalina. The number of people who have leapt onto Catalina immediately after it shipped has been surprising (and a little alarming to cautious-upgrade me), and we've been receiving emails and calls about a Catalina-compatible version.

We decided it was important to support our faithful users and industry friends, so we've chosen to release ColorThink Pro 3.0.8 for 64-bit. This has feature parity with the 32-bit version you currently use and should behave the same way as much as possible. Windows users will still run the 32-bit version and we expect to release a 64-bit version for Windows in the 4.x release cycle. ColorThink 2 users (non Pro) will have to wait a bit longer as we're still determining how best to bring them into the 64-bit world.

We're creating and testing builds regularly and have now made ColorThink Pro 3.0.8 64-bit available for beta testing. You can download it from the ColorThink download page. PLEASE check out the ReadMe notes with each new beta version to see the known issues (things you may notice that don't need reporting) and also please let us know about the things that need fixing. We understand there may be some outstanding issues from 3.0.7 that have not been addressed in 3.0.8 64-bit but our plan and priority is to create feature parity as much as possible.

Thanks everyone for your patience and for using ColorThink for almost 20 years!

If you are in the State of Washington in early October, make plans on coming to the:

JVH Digital Festival

October 3, 2019Bellevue Washington

The Harrington family are a top-notch dealer for large format inkjet printers in the local Seattle market. They are generously hosting this free educational event for their customers and anyone who is interested in learning more about printing, photography and color management. Pat Herold of CHROMiX will be one of the speakers, teaching a beginner's session on color management.

The JVH festivals are always fun, worthwhile events - packed with practical information for the small photography or printing business. If you are in Washington, you don't want to miss this!

You can even enter your printed artwork or photography in the print contest.

Our friend Jeff Collins,and another friend, Mike Todryk, of IWCO Direct have a great discussion on how Mike was able to take a company with an enormous variety of printing devices & technologies, and transform it so that they know where their color is, they have their color under control, and they maintain a "shared neutral appearance" - through the wonder of G7. Mike shares details about the software they used, and what they did to improve procedures for saving time, money and hitting industry standard color. A special bonus near the end includes the mistakes that brand owners commonly make when communicate color to printers.

For years this blog has been proudly telling our profiling secrets to all who would listen. One of the policies that makes for a better profile, for certain papers and fabrics, is the use of polarized measurements. Our president, Steve Upton, has been hammering on the instrument makers for years to please include polarizing capability into their new instruments. One company that had seemed deaf to our pleas has been X-Rite.

Turns out, maybe they were listening after all! X-Rite recently announced a new i1Pro: The i1Pro 3 Plus. This model is made specifically to take measurements of textiles and other unusual materials. Important features include:

-Polarization filter that enables the instrument to take M3 measurements

-A larger, 8mm aperture to get better sampling of fabric patterns

-The instrument can support transmission scanning for backlit film.

-The IO table has been updated to support this new i1Pro 3 Plus, and now enables measuring backlit materials.

The new i1Pro 3 Plus and the new IO table are slated to be available in July, 2019.

Microsoft recently announced that they are in development of a new Xbox gaming console. Those who hang on these news items scoured the daily videos prior to the announcement, to see if Microsoft gave any advanced clues. In the videos were screen elements that looked like "R 255" "G 86" and such. It turns out they were leaving a clue about the internal code name for the new gaming console: It's called "Scarlett" and the RGB values they left as a clue were: 255, 36, 0. How about that?! A color enthusiast can be one step ahead of his friends when it comes to guessing code names of upcoming gaming consoles!

If you are a card-carrying color geek, you probably already know that you do not define the color scarlet merely using the RGB numbers 255, 36, 0. RGB numbers are merely device values and don't in themselves describe a color unless they are accompanied by a printing condition or profile. (In a similar way, the number "4" on a toaster does not by itself tell you what color toast you're going to get.)

However, the illustration below shows that 255, 36, 0 in the ProPhotoRGB color space for example, is a much more saturated color than 255, 36, 0 in sRGB. It's always a good policy to define your terms!